Alan Mercer was at his desk in the regional capacity building bureau in Assosa, western Ethiopia, when a man burst into his office, distraught. Right at the end of a four-year master's degree programme, he had lost the only copy of his thesis to a computer virus. Mercer, an IT trainer with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), wasn't surprised. "Show me an Ethiopian computer without a virus and I'd ask which foreigner it belongs to," he says.
While western countries have partially learned to neutralise the threat of computer viruses, Africa has become a hive of trojans, worms and exploiters of all stripes. As PC use on the continent has spread in the past decade (in Ethiopia it has gone from 0.01% of the Ethiopian population to 0.45% through 1999-2008), viruses have hitched a ride, wreaking havoc on development efforts, government programmes and fledgling businesses.
Infection rate
"It wouldn't be unreasonable to say 80% of all computers you find in Africa will have some nastiness on them," says Tariq Khokhar, the chief development officer of Aptivate, a non-governmental organisation that focuses on IT. This compares to around 30% in the UK, according to Panda Security. The cost is hard to measure, but ask IT consultants and development workers about the impact, and the stories pour out. Mercer tells of an agriculture bureau employee who lost the multi-year plan for agricultural improvements for the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia's fourth poorest area. Jeremy Brown, an IT consultant in Cameroon, says that one client was operating with more than 200 infected files, drastically slowing down its PCs, corrupting confidential information and exposing it over the internet. Even the Congress of South African Trade Unions found in May that its website was spreading viruses to visitors. "Viruses are pretty endemic," says Brown. "All organisations and individuals are affected by them."
Viruses spontaneously reboot computers, destroy vital data, and clog Ethiopia's already severely pinched internet connection (it is not unusual to wait 10 minutes to access a single web page). The result: funding applications delayed, small businesses hurt, and hours wasted. "PCs that were bought with limited funds or donated sit collecting dust in the corner of the room because they have been devastated by viruses," says André Mohamed, an IT professional in Ethiopia. "It's a major reduction in productivity and efficiency."
"Viruses are our enemy," says Debebe Fikreselassie, the head of ICT at the Benishangul-Gumuz bureau where Mercer is a VSO volunteer. "We are installing free antivirus but the behaviour of the virus is changing [over] time … and developing countries lack money to buy licensed antivirus like Symantec."
That hits the nail on the head, agrees Tim Unwin, the Unesco chair of ICT4D, an IT development collective at Royal Holloway, University of London. "The fundamental problem is that institutions in much of the developing world cannot afford the antivirus [AV] protection that those in richer countries can," he says. Khokhar agrees. "For Africa, the cost of AV is pretty damn high. An annual licence of £30 per user per year can get pretty daunting when you've got 1,000 users."
Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/ethiopia-computer-virus
